Galileo's Middle Finger Read Online Free PDF Page B

cataloged each individual article’s specific report, opinion, or theory—if it expressed one—about Adam’s apples, beards, behaviors, breasts, clitorises, erotic orientations, gonads, hair, interests, labia, menstrual signs, penises, prostates, scrotums, skeletal proportions, uteruses, voices, vaginas, and vulvas. Doing this allowed me to sort, for example, by breasts, to see whether there were patterns or shifts in what medical and scientific men thought about the meaning of feminine breasts in a supposed man, or the meaning of perky nipples in a manly woman.
    I ended up with notebooks filled with hundreds of dot-matrix-printed, three-hole-punched pages of data—and a growing clarity about what had happened. Over the course of the nineteenth century, there were more and more doctors, more and more people were going to doctors, and the medical profession was enabling and rewarding publication, so the incidence of reports of humans with sex anomalies shot up and up. This alarmed the medical men even as they were tremendously fascinated. After all, social order was based on the presumption that it reflected natural order, yet nature seemed to have a very bad habit of not picking up after herself.
    Upon expert examination, a surprising number of people showed obvious external ambiguity in their genitals. Others mixed a masculine chest and beard with feminine genitalia or feminine breasts with a penis . Still others looked all well and good on the outside but were discovered (during surgery or autopsy) to in fact have the other sex’s organs inside . A very few even claimed they were clearly female as children but had become quite manly at puberty .
    Notably, most of the people who showed up in the nineteenth-century medical literature with sex anomalies seemed either not to know or not to be terribly bothered. Sometimes a woman wanted an explanation as to why her vagina seemed to be too small to accommodate her husband’s penis. A man and his wife wanted to know why the husband seemed to bleed on a monthly cycle, while a chambermaid in another city wanted to know why she never seemed to menstruate. On rare occasions, a child or an adult was reassigned from one gender role to another after being diagnosed as a victim of “mistaken sex.” (The “mistake” was often blamed on some stupid midwife.) But most often, nineteenth-century patients with such traits just went on with their lives as before their clinical exam, probably never knowing just how high they’d made the doctors’ eyebrows rise .
    Late-nineteenth-century medical and scientific men had little interest in changing social mores just because nature was turning out to be a bit churlish where sex was concerned. Instead they opted to impose order on nature as best they could. They came to a consensus by the 1890s that made sex look a lot more organized than it really was. They decided that “true sex” would depend only on the gonads: If you had ovaries, no matter how many manly traits they came with, you were really a female (though perhaps a female pseudohermaphrodite); if you had testes, then you were really a male (though perhaps a male pseudohermaphrodite); and only if you were absolutely positively proven to have both ovarian and testicular tissue were you a “true hermaphrodite.”
    Conveniently, because biopsies were not possible at this time, the only people who could be conclusively labeled true hermaphrodites were at least castrated and more often dead. This approach pretty much neutered any threat that hermaphroditism might have posed to the social order. Virtually everybody was
really
male or female; sex just
looked
blurry to the untrained eye. Problem solved. As I documented this cleverly constructed solution to blurry sex, I decided to label this period the Age of Gonads .
    Of course, not too much later—in the 1910s—biopsies
did
become possible, and the Age of Gonads had to cease. Suddenly doctors could conclusively diagnose working